Kali on the Chuwi Hi10 Pro

This is a short tutorial on dual booting windows and Kali on the Chuwi Hi10 Pro.

Updated for Kali 2018.4

When I first wrote this post I seriously wouldn’t have recommended Kali on the Chuwi Hi10 Pro as an every-day system – Starting with 2018.01 and the 4.14 kernel it makes a much nicer install experience (the kind that I’m used to with other platforms) so, if you really want to use kali as a day-to-day system on the chuwi then it will work for you :)

If you are using kali 2018.4 then pretty much everything works out of the box, except the touch screen and the rotated frame-buffer in the console

Etcher (now called balenaEtcher) works on osx, windows and linux, so its a good choice, though you could use unetbootin or rufus.

3) Boot your chuwi from the usb device (apparently you cant do it form the on-board SD card reader)To get to the boot menu on the chuwi hi10 pro, you need to press F7 on boot. that brings up the menu to select the boot device.(You’ll notice that all of this is with the screen on its side :| )

4) Partition / resizeOne I had booted into kali as a live environment, I ran gparted and I removed the windows partition – but you may want to do something else

5) InstallOnce the partition changes are applied, reboot and boot from the kali usb and select install from the grub boot prompt – follow the install instructions and use the partition space freed in the above steps

6) BootingTo boot kali you’ll need to press f7 and select kali from the uefi boot options (the chuwi bootloader will still show android and windows)

Kali on the Chuwi Hi10 Pro – What doesnt work out of the box:

Framebuffer

You can rotate your virtual framebuffers using fbcon. 0 through 3 to represent the various rotations:

0 – Normal rotation

< strong >1 – Rotate clockwise

< strong >2 – Rotate upside down

< strong >3 – Rotate counter-clockwise

These can be set from the command line by putting a value into the correct system file. Rotate the current framebuffer:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate

Rotate all virtual framebuffers:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/class/graphics/fbcon/rotate_all

If you want this to happen automatically when you start your system, you need to modify your boot loader configuration to give it the correct options. In /etc/default/grub add fbcon=rotate:1 to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=efifb fbcon=rotate:1"

(Don’t forget to run sudo update-grub after changing this file.)

Touchscreen

The touchscreen drivers are not yet part of the mainline kernel, you do need to get the firmware aswell

Check dmesg and touch the screen. It should work :) The touchscreen works much better in 2017.2, but doesnt seem to respond when you change the orientation of your screen (as a workaround I found that changing the screen back to thedefault orientation, then re-rotating it seemed to fix the touchscreen)

if the touchscreen is wonky, try copying the firmware from the hi10_pro-z8350 folder and modprobing again

X display

As of kali 2018.4, you don’t need to rotate your X display, it will automatically adjust correctly